The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Pakistan has recently secured Green Climate Fund (GCF) funds for increasing the climate resilience of agriculture and water management in the Indus Basin. Given the region’s climate vulnerability, it is critical to improve information services and build the country’s capacity to use this information to cope with the impacts of climate change on the agriculture and water sector. Establishing a water accounting system is the first step to better managing water resources and maintaining agricultural yield; however, limited technical capacity and lack of ground data remains a challenge. Therefore, FutureWater aims to not only offer an improved understanding of water accounting for key stakeholders but also conduct a capacity needs assessment to design and deliver tailor-made trainings which will focus on using open-access datasets to implement water accounting at different spatial scales.
Pakistan is ranked as the 8th most climate vulnerable country in the world as per the Global Climate Risk Index (2019) and in recent years has been facing the worst brunt of climate change. Irregular and intense precipitation, heatwaves, droughts, and floods have severely impacted the agriculture and water sector. Approximately, 90% of the country’s freshwater resources are utilized by the agricultural sector. However, lack of information services makes it a challenge to implement a water accounting system for improved water resources management.
The GCF funded project titled “Transforming the Indus Basin with Climate Resilient Agriculture and Water Management” aims to shift agriculture and water management to a new paradigm in which processes are effectively adapting to climate change and are able to sustain livelihoods. FAO Pakistan, as per the request of the Ministry of Climate Change, has designed the project to develop the country’s capacity to enhance the resilience of the agricultural and water sector. There are three major components:
1. Enhancing information services for climate change adaptation in the water and agriculture sectors
2. Building on-farm resilience to climate change
3. Creating an enabling environment for continued transformation
FutureWater will be actively involved in Component 1 which focuses on facilitating the development of a water accounting system and improving the availability and use of information services. Given the limited data availability in the region, FutureWater will integrate the use of remote sensing technologies within the existing Water Accounting methodology to address this gap. A capacity and needs assessment will be conducted and a series of tailor-made trainings will be designed subsequently to enable key government stakeholders to use open-source geospatial analysis tools as well as models to estimate real water savings, particularly in the context of agriculture. The trainings will help build the country’s capacity to implement water accounting at different spatiotemporal scales and cope with the worsening impacts of climate change.
